PixelatedArcade News

New Trixter video just dropped! Jim Leonard, better known as Trixter, is is among the most knowledgeable PC game historians out there. He also has quite a talent for putting together well researched videos with extremely high production values; I've linked to a few before including his in-depth look at the IBM PCjr. Trixter is also a collector of games and PC related hardware, and in his collection is the insanely rare Mindscape Music Board. What, exactly, is this historical curiousity? This card is essentially a copy of the Mockingboard for the Apple II and generates sound from two General Instruments AY-3-8913 sound chips to provide you six channels of sound and noise. It was included with the program Bank Street Music Writer, and unfortunately never went further than that. For more details and answers to even more questions, check out the latest YouTube video, Do you own the rarest PC sound card in the world?. You'll learn about the card's history, there are interviews with some of its creators, and perhaps most importantly demonstrations so you can hear the card in action (you won't find any emulators supporting this one, at least not yet)...

Somewhat recently a new feature for PixelatedArcade has been quietly rolled out which is intended to document which video mode a game utilizes for supported hardware. For some platforms and games you'll now see this in the technical specs tab; for platforms such as the PC where there is a wide variety of hardware, the resolutions utilized are listed in the display hardware supported section — click the icon there to expand the section and show the list! Other platforms, such as the Commodore 64, are more uniform and don't have different display adapters available. In these cases the resolutions supported are listed at the bottom of the tech specs. And, as it turns out, there's actually a lot of complications in documenting this information; it wasn't unusual for hardware of the era to have some seemingly bizarre design decisions that resulted from the desire to improve the display quality at a cheaper cost, and no matter what the hardware was programmers at the time had some impressive skills that could make whatever the hardware was intended to do null and void by finding clever work arounds. All of this makes it not quite as easy to document something as simple as the resolution a game uses as it may sound. Still, I wanted to get this feature going, so the point of this post is to note a few of the quirks encountered and how they are listed at PixelatedArcade.

Here we are at the end of yet another year...so welcome to the traditional end-of-year roundup! As always, a lot was going on this year so I was again unable to keep up the monthly news/review cadence. But plenty of updates and game information was sorted out, and below another tradition will be continued with a handfull of mini-reviews! This time around I've picked out four games which are presented below in ascending order, from worst to best. Outside of the the classic games realm, what games have I been playing this year? I wish there was more time, so not much and I'm probably not the person to look to if you want reviews of the very latest and greatest. This year, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Super Mario Wonder have been my games of choice; I highly recommend both, they're outstanding! Meanwhile, my nephew has been engrossed in Minecraft and Roblox; he doesn't seem to be taking to the adventures and RPG's that I love. Could be he's still too young or just has different tastes, but either way I'm glad he's having fun! That's enough rambling for now, let's get to it...

Summer is definitely underway! The weather has been extrememly hot and humid, so yard work is out of the question most days. Instead, I've been indoors enjoying some games, and now it's time for some site maintenance and upgrades. Throughout July you may occasionally notice some brief downtime or other oddities as work is being done behind the scenes. The updates need to get done eventually, so might as well work on it while hanging out in the air conditioning is desirable. In the meantime, hopefully your summer is going well, a little late but happy pride month, and until next time take care!

Heading into the late 1980's after having worked on a number of successful games for Gametek, CBS Software, and more, Roger Pedersen attempted going out on his own with a handful of games published under the Pedersen Systems, Inc. banner. It's been a while since I've posted a game review, so let's take a look at one of these games. This time around it's Cyber Cop, an amazingly awful action game. Thanks to a decent idea and CGA graphics that aren't too bad, this one can almost look good if you squint; but, it's not...

When the IBM PC was released in 1981, the Color/Graphics option had a still somewhat uncommon feature that IBM called “all points addressable graphics” in the documentation. What this meant was you could take any pixel on the screen, set it to any available color you wanted, there was no impact or limitation from the colors of adjacent pixels and you were not limited to only choosing characters from the character set as with text modes. Most color computers of the era weren't quite this flexible and still had some unusual color limitations; in order to keep costs down while improving performance, a myriad of color schemes were devised which provided more colors on the screen at one time than the IBM PC offered, but the tradeoff was you couldn't just set any pixel to any arbitrary color. One of the more common schemes was to limit colors to only two per block of pixels (such as on the ZX Spectrum which allowed two colors every 8x8 pixels). Color clash (sometimes also known as attribute clash) was the term commonly used for the resulting artifact of colors seemingly bleeding from one area into another that resulted with these color schemes. Creating graphics within these limitations was a challenge and previously I looked at a few examples in When Colors Clash. These were all loading screens from a handful of 8-bit computers in order to demonstrate the issue and show examples of how artists worked with the constraints for static screens. Getting attractive graphics put together was tough enough there, but what happens if we add movement to the equation? Usually trouble! For action games (or any game with some sort of animation) the problem is now worse as the artist has less control over where to position elements on the screen to hide or work around color clash, instead the graphics need to follow the action of the game. Some common patterns and techniques did emerge, however, so this time let's take a look at a few of the tricks of the trade developers utilized to deal with this limitation outside of the loading screen and during the game itself...

Another code update has been pushed live for PixelatedArcade, and this time around the main new feature adds the ability to view some screenshots with colors simulated for different monitor types. When supported, you'll see a drop-down menu below screenshots after clicking on them which allows you to select your preferred monitor. A while back I had written about tales of CGA colors, and this update finally delivers the feature to view different CGA color possibilities. Additionally, you can also view Amstrad CPC screenshots in both color and monochrome. Previously this feature was available for Apple II and Hercules Monochrome screenshots, so I'm delighted to introduce this expansion...

It's nearing the end of 2023, and time for the traditional end-of-year roundup! And what a year it's been... some real life challenges kept me from the once a month cadence for news or reviews, but we did have the IBM PCjr's 40th Anniversary sneak up, so that was fun! From a behind-the-scenes point of view, lots of changes were made with some pretty sizeable code updates; unfortunately there was a lot of downtime this year, but with new updates in place and other configuration changes PixelatedArcade should be more stable than ever going into the new year. Similarly, a significant update to my photography site PixelatedImages is underway and I hope to begin making updates there again next year. It's also notable that PixelatedArcade finally crossed the 3000 game entries mark! Maybe not the largest site, but slowly gaps are filled in to hopefully become an incredibly useful, intuitive, and informative site. Below are the latest database stats along with a few mini-reviews. Happy holidays everyone!